Perhaps you can rattle off the preamble or make a declaration about independence, but can you recognize passages from other important American documents? Or provide background facts about the events that led to the letters and legislation? What was the Pendleton Act? Whose assassination led to its existence? What did Executive Order 9981 deal with? This box of 48 cards, put together by the National Archives, has all the answers (and the questions, too). The fronts of the cards feature quotations from the documents; the backs provide the sources of the passages, plus well-researched and concise accounts of their origins. From the Declaration of Independence to the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, more than two hundred years of US history are packed into this pocket-sized quiz deck!

On September 25, 1789, the First Congress of the United States proposed 12 amendments to the Constitution. Ten of the 12 were ratified by three-fourths of the state legislatures on December 15, 1791. The ratified Articles constitute the first 10 amendments of the Constitution, or the U.S. Bill of Rights. In 1992, 203 years after it was proposed, Article 2 was ratified as the 27th Amendment to the Constitution. Article 1 was never ratified.

The original Bill of Rights is officially the 1789 Joint Resolution of Congress proposing the amendments. It is on display in the Rotunda at the National Archives Museum.